Patti LuPone on ‘Agatha All Along’ sigil, channeling Glinda in next trial (exclusive)

This article contains spoilers from Agatha All Along episodes 1-6.

Apparently that sigil was more powerful than we thought.

Episode 6 of Agatha All Along, titled “Familiar by Thy Side,” revealed that Lilia Calderu, Patti LuPone‘s divination witch, was the one who placed the identity-masking spell on Billy Kaplan (Joe Locke), having foreseen that the boy from Eastview would die in a car crash at the age of 13, allowing his body to be inhabited by the spirit of Wanda’s witchy son, Billy Maximoff. A side effect of the sigil is that Lilia can’t remember casting it. The same goes for LuPone herself.

The Broadway legend is currently performing on stage in The Roommate while Agatha All Along episodes drop week by week on Disney+. “The wig master and prop master came up to me individually and went, ‘You put the sigil on Teen!’ I totally forgot,” LuPone tells Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview after episode 6 aired. “I went, ‘Oh, right! I did.'”

Now that the secret’s out, Lilia will play a bigger part in answering some questions on this puzzle-box series from showrunner Jac Schaeffer (WandaVision). Episode 7, dropping tonight at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET, features the divination trial of the Witches’ Road. So it’s Lilia’s time to shine. And, no, she and Sasheer Zamata‘s Jennifer Kale did not die in that sinking mud after Locke’s Billy blasted them off the Road.

“Jac is so clever in how she can lay in the puzzle and then resolve it,” LuPone prefaces. “I didn’t connect the dots when I first read all of the episodes. In 7, as Lilia’s powers are awakening, she’s tying up all of these events that we’ve seen in the previous episodes. There’s an explanation to it.”

EW can reveal an exclusive clip of the trial from the episode (shown above), which sees the remaining coven (R.I.P. Alice and Mrs. Hart) dressed as iconic movie witches: Lilia as Glinda, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) as the Wicked Witch, Billy as Maleficent, and Jen as the Evil Queen from Snow White. Aubrey Plaza‘s Rio Vidal is once again M.I.A.

“Who would ever imagine that I would play Glinda, the good witch?” LuPone exclaims. “The thing that is a well-kept secret is that I’m a comedian. I say this with tongue in cheek, but Evita ruined my career. I came out of Evita as this tycoon, bitch tap dancer, but my first Tony nomination was a slapstick comedy, Rosalind in As You Like It. The character was very ditzy and sweet, but people don’t associate that aspect with me because of the parts I have been cast in musical theater. So Glinda wasn’t necessarily a stretch for me, Patti, even though it might seem that way for the majority of people that know my career. I know that side of me.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

The sneak peek depicts Lilia preparing to divine Billy’s path through cards, explaining how they work and what the layout of the table means. “That layout, for lack of a better word, was Jac’s invention,” LuPone points out. “I had to memorize it because it was very specifically what each card will represent in your life’s journey. They will represent certain aspects: love, destiny, fortune, profession.”

In previous interviews with EW, Locke called this episode the best of the show “purely because of Jac Schaeffer’s incredible form and storytelling,” while Hahn said getting into Wicked Witch mode opposite LuPone’s Glinda was “a childhood dream come true.”

“I think I speak for a lot of us, we were breathless when we got to see Patti as a good witch for that first time,” Hahn said. “It was so dear and perfect, and just the sweetest thing — not words that you would normally [use to] describe this powerhouse on a stage.”

LuPone further teases Lilia’s bond with Zamata’s Jen in the coming hour of streaming television. “Sasheer and I talk about the essence of a witch in a way that hasn’t been discussed before in the episodes,” she says. “We’re still cantankerous with each other — a bit, not completely — and in this particular [episode], we bond as a unit. That’s, I guess, what Lilia needs to accomplish to form that coven again. And what is the definition of coven, basically? Protection of your soulmates, protection of the people that you care about, acknowledgement of that. I think it has a lot of heart.”

Watch the exclusive sneak peek of Agatha All Along episode 7 in the video above ahead of its debut tonight at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on Disney+.